Roy Tang

These weeknotes are coming in late in the day because of reasons. (The reasons being laziness and procrastination.)

Actually, I feel like I’ve been kind of phoning in the weeknotes over the past few weeks, they’ve mostly been “hey, I’ve been busy, so nothing of significance happened, but here are some things I watched/played.” Supposedly one of the side effects of writing regular updates is that you tend to look out for more interesting things to do so you have something to write about, even on an unconscious level. In the past few weeks, that has been problematic because (a) as mentioned, I’ve been busy with some things, so my excess time is devoted to less mentally taxing things like just watching movies/shows or destress with games; and (b) we are still in the middle of a pandemic!

Speaking of the pandemic, I read this piece recently on the Financial Times: We won’t remember much of what we did in the pandemic, about how the sameyness of our days in quarantine means our brains compress that data since so little of it is meaningful, affecting our perception of time. When 99% of your activities take place in the same environment, in your room during a zoom call, everything just tends to blur together. And I guess that reflected in the weeknotes too! (For that reason, I’m switching up the weeknotes format today to be more freeform prose, we’ll see if it sticks.)

Speaking of the pandemic part 2, one thing I have been doing since the pandemic started is writing a regular series of notes, first as one long post that I kept updating every couple of days or so then later I transitioned to regular weekly update notes, on the same day as these weeknotes. The idea was that in the future I could just browse the covid19 tag on the site and I could recall what things were like during the days of quarantine and the quality of the government response. And this was fine during the start, since things happened and unfolded quickly. But these past few months, the updates have fallen in the quagmire of sameyness as well: I only went out once every 1 or 2 weeks, everything was always getting worse, cases were always going up, government response was always terrible, and so on. One thing the last few months has made clear for me is that the government has no clear plan on controlling this thing and so I am highly pessimistic that things will change anytime soon. For that reason, I’m just going to pause on doing the covid19 update notes for now, unless some drastic change happens.(I have no expectation of Russia’s vaccine having any effect on our status quo anytime soon!)

Anyway, so how was my week? I wrapped up the things causing my busy-ness towards the middle of the week, so I expect to be less busy/stressed during the coming weeks. At the very least, I should be able to write on the blog more, and maybe do some work on some of my other side projects. I actually thought about writing some posts already last week but I was like you know what, I’ll just relax and watch things and play things and leave the writing to next week.

Here are the things I’ve been watching and playing the past week:

• Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD had their series finale last Thursday. I enjoyed the first half of this season, but the second half and the finale were just ok, maybe slightly meh. Still, the series finale was pretty good, wrapping things up nicely with a big bow. This series had a lot of haters, I think mostly because of mismatched expectations, because people wanted it to be more directly tied-in to the MCU movies, but that was never going to happen (maybe we’ll get that more with the coming Disney+ series). But I like it, it had a lot of fans, and it had a pretty good run. And it had Ghost Rider!
• One things I’ve been playing a bunch is Amonkhet Remastered, which came out on Magic Arena last Thursday. I’ve been doing drafts over on the twitch channel, and archiving them to this playlist on the Youtube channel. It’s fairly fun, though I need to play better. Watch me on Twitch/Youtube, or like and subscribe, all that jazz, if you like.
• Oh, I also finally finished Divinity Original Sin 2! I really dragged out that last act for a few months, but I finally got there.
• I also tried out Fall Guys on PS4 (free on PS+!). It’s fun but kind of frustrating, I guess this is why I don’t really play these battle royale kind of things.
• Played a little bit Street Fighter x Tekken because of a reddit thread and am once again disappointed that (a) it was such a missed opportunity; and (b) up to now it’s still not available on Steam in SEA.

Okay, so one of the reasons I’ve been doing these “watching/playing lately” posts and segments is because I want to track what I have been watching/playing at any particular point in the past. And maybe I can have like a widget on the site with things like “Recently played” or “Last movie watched”. I’d also want to be able to search/query for things like “what year did I watch so-and-so movie?” (Helps with trivia quizzes!) I feel like I need to be recording these detail in more of a machine-readable format or a database in order to do those kinds of things. Maybe some kind of Goodreads-like system? It’s something I’d need to figure out how to implement.

Ok, this is already longer than I thought it would be. More things will be posted to the blog (hopefully!) later this week!